Information technology (IT) systems have traditionally been built based on stand-alone architectures. These traditional IT systems are intended to support a wide variety of workloads and hence each IT system contains operating components such as processors, memory, fans, input/output (I/O), etc. In large computing environments, this often leads to unnecessary redundancy and low utilization rates, since not every type of workload requires each component to be operating at maximum capacity. Component utilization levels as low as 20% are common in several enterprise data centers. Such architectures in turn generally require the provision of uniform cooling capacity across the entire data center. This leads to higher acquisition and operating costs as well as unnecessary wastage as the entire system reaches end-of-life whenever any of these components need to be upgraded.
From a cooling perspective, the primary components of the traditional IT system that require cooling are a microprocessor, a hard disk, memory, I/O and, in some instances, a power supply. However, these components have different cooling characteristics. The different cooling characteristics may be caused by the different geometric shapes, different power dissipation rates, and different power densities of each component. Because of the different cooling characteristics the components are amenable to different cooling systems. For example, components such as hard disk drives and memory require substantially less cooling as compared to other components, such as microprocessors.